Towards the end of Act Two of Lev Dodin's production, Elena and her
stepdaughter Sonya have reached a rapprochement, and Elena, a little drunk,
feels like playing the piano. Actress Ksenia Rappoport begins fingering
an imaginary keyboard on the table. When Sonya returns with the news that
the pompous Serebryakov forbids actual playing, Elena clinks her wine-glass
in an ironic toast against one of her husband's array of medicine bottles;
then, emboldened, she tries to play the "Blue Danube" waltz on the whole
pharmacy. Suddenly stricken by remorse, she lovingly strokes one of Serebryakov's
galoshes; then, regaining sight of the absurdity, puts them on and makes
a shuffling, ambivalent exit, leaving Sonya (Elena Kalinina) mutely and
impassively to straighten out the tray of bottles. Lights; interval.

I recount these couple of minutes' business in such detail because they
serve as a microcosm of what Dodin and his Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg
achieve with Chekhov's play. Without melodrama, they precisely lay out
its emotional territory. Even the relative positions of groups of characters
on the stage in supposedly casual conversation shows us their relationships
to and feelings for one another; the surface events, meanwhile, simply
present the personal, family and financial banalities of Chekhovian landed-but-shabby
nobodies. As Vanya himself, Sergei Kurishev is just such a nonentity. Dodin,
working in concert with Chekhov's script, cannily prevents us from feeling
all that much for Vanya, because the character is such an ineffectual whinger;
his laments for what he could have done with his life sound as trite to
us as the three sisters' nostalgia for Moscow in Chekhov's next play.

The production is all very Russian, of course, playing out to the three-hour
mark with a kind of vodka sluggishness. This pacing, too, shows us the
play's emotions in their natural register without calling either for implausible
declamation or conspicuous underplaying. The stage is kept virtually bare,
apart from simple chairs and tables moved on and off by the cast; the real
onstage architecture is built from the currents between the people there.
The Maly are no strangers to Britain, and routinely attract swarms of superlatives
on their visits here. You can see why. After playing as part of the Brighton
Festival, the show moves to the Barbican in London for next week only.